Singing in the Subway

by Katharine Ulrich

Her voice echoes beautifully, not competing with the din of the school children chattering and the homeless people shouting and the clicks of turnstiles and clattering of shifting train tracks, but complementing it. The harried commuters rush by to get to Penn Station to take the LIRR, the hipsters head to Brooklyn on the NQR, and mothers pushing strollers rush to catch the uptown 6, but for just a moment, people in the Union Square subway station are brought together by that age-old unifier: music. And in that moment, there is a community in the subway, one of the least friendly places in New York, all because of Natalie Gelman, subway chanteuse.

“You have to be prepared for anything. You don’t know who you will connect with, who will open up their heart to your music,” says Gelman. “You’re throwing people out of their normal daily commute…you’re giving them something more substantial to think about than ‘what’s for dinner?’”

As a native New Yorker born to musician parents, Gelman began performing at open mic nights in clubs like CBGB and The Bitter End when she was only 17, but it was the subway that really influenced her music style, allowing her to sing for a wider variety of listeners.

“In a perfect world, the term alternative would still mean what it used to in the ‘90’s,” she says of her genre. “But it [my music] straddles the line between the quieter and more intimate stuff, but also powerful and rocking. It’s alterna-rock punk-pop.”

After a few attempts at “busking” (as street performing is called) nine years ago, a friend encouraged Natalie to start playing guitar and singing in the subway for money. It was here she realized the influence not only she can have as a performer, but subway performing can have on her. As a member of Music Under New York, or MUNY, Natalie now has a schedule of where to perform, her MUNY permit affording her protection from harassment by police officers for starting crowds.

MUNY was initiated by the Mass Transit Authority in 1987 to promote the music culture by “presenting quality music to the commuting public” according to its website. With over 100 musical acts performing music of various genres, from folk to opera to blues, the popular program is positively changing our commutes. Just ask Cathy Grier, or NYC Subway Girl, a MUNY member since 1999.

“The message of MUNY is just ‘good sounds’,” says Grier. “Whether you like the genre or not, any music is definitely more pleasing than door alarms and metal scratching and grating train brakes. The program is to create and provide diversity, and as a performer, your lofty ideals of life, career and success are turned around. It’s a humbling experience.”

Despite having performed her “folked-up blues” music everywhere from bars in Key West, Florida, to across Germany as a member of a touring French girl band, Grier is most inspired by subway performing, favoring three spots within Grand Central (each location has different acoustics and atmosphere, so she “changes rhythms and tempos accordingly”). She is even recording an album of songs about the subway in the subway.

“Music becomes different in the subway. I’m influenced by what’s around me,” says Grier. “I’m not just standing there-it’s different every time. You pick up on the energy around you.”

Tom Swafford, a classically trained composer and arranger with a PhD in composing from UC Berkeley, also recorded an album about performing in the subway called 7th Avenue. At first, he did not even realize he was improvising the same songs repeatedly, but when he did, he decided to make an album.

“An album would literally give me a record of what I’ve been doing with my life lately,” says Swafford. “I played so often at the 7th Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, people who knew my music appreciated it.”

Although Gelman, Grier and Swafford have had very different performance experiences, all describe the subway as one of their favorite venues due to the inherent spontaneity of busking underground.

“It took me awhile to understand the concept of performing in the subway. Live performance is a type of art in itself,” says Cathy. “The immediate reaction, or no reaction. Either way, you’re part of the fabric. It’s a pass-through because people are not coming to hear you [like at a concert]. This is a way to just make people happy.”

This is a sentiment shared by all subway musicians; regardless of what type of music they are playing, it is about how that music makes the listeners feel that matters. Across the board, the goal is to put a smile on the face of just one person.

It is not a requirement to be a MUNY member to perform in the subway, however. Plenty of musicians perform without a permit due to a variety of reasons, including the competitiveness of becoming a MUNY member.

Morgan O'Kane taking a break in Union Square subway station

“The nice part about playing on the streets and in the subway is there are no real rules,” says O’Kane. “The city just wants a piece of everyone, and I’m doing my part to give it with my music.”

In other words, he does not need MUNY because it’s the freedom that comes with performing that he enjoys. O’Kane does not have another job besides busking around Union Square and Lorimer stations, but does make “a decent living.”

This is what makes playing in the New York City subway the ultimate performance: you do not need a permit, contract, producer, album, or big name. You need your voice, perhaps a musical instrument, and that is it. Commuters can come and go, but that experience of performing will last forever. You were there and sang a song, and even if only with a smile, you changed someone.

“Subway performance is just about the music,” says Swafford. “It’s about the expression of the players, what we are communicating to the commuters. It’s not about flashy labels and showing off. It’s about expressing a genuine love for music, plain and simple.”

Update 2

Hi, all. I hope we spend some time on Tuesday talking about the coverage of the reported death of bin Laden. Interesting, indeed.

As for my project, this week just made me realize how many incredibly talented musicians perform in the subway. I recently made friends with a man who plays the didgeridoo, a group of male break dancers, and a really strange man that sings while he makes a puppet move to the beat (!?). I need to figure out who my
“star” stars are though for the piece – I need better quotes. So far, I don’t have any stand-out interviews, but I do have a lot of background information on what subway performing is like. It’s coming together, but slowly. I want to get some high quality videos to include in the final blog post (I do have one so far, but the acoustics are a bit off). Lastly, I put a call into two of the Arts for Transit authorized (and publicized) musician groups. I think it will all come together.

Subway Performance Artists

Ok I don’t know why, but the “links” feature is not working for me right now. I keep trying to link to all of the various websites I have used for my research so far, but it won’t let me. Basically, I got the idea to write about the subway performance artists (most of whom are musicians) through a NY Magazine article from February 27. Then, I read various online articles about the musicians, including the March 21 blog post from the NY Times (about the changing face of subway musicians), a April 19 NY Daily News article about Lyle Divinksy (a singer/guitarist), and additional NY Magazine articles about different performers (one about Susan Cagle, who has now sold 30,000 copies of her album because of her subway performing). Additionally, I researched the various laws associated with performing, especially in regard to MTA – Arts for Transit and MUNY. In the past week I have checked out musicians at Lorimer, Union Square, Battery Park and Bed-Stuy stations.

In my research, I have noticed a couple of (random) things that might pose problems/become more interesting. A) It is going to be hard to find new ways of saying “performer” throughout the piece without being contrived. B) Many of the laws contradict one another, or at least the resultant discrepancies between law enforcement and musicians contradict the actual laws. C) People actually can and do get arrested…for singing too loud? Shameful. D) Some people have actually garnered moderate fame from this. E) MUNY is actually very selective, but also a permit is NOT necessary to perform down below the city.

So, as for my angle: I know we discussed the MUNY tryouts and such, but I’m trying a different route. I, of course, am intrigued by the legality of the whole thing. I get a kick out of interviewing police officers (“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can not give you an answer at this time”) and I want to focus not on the shiny cool performers that cover freaking Oasis/The Beatles, but the homeless guys that just belt it for kicks. So basically I’m going to figure out the intricacies of the nitty gritty underside of performing underground.

Coney Island, Lonely Island

Courtesy of Astrid Parenty

by Katharine Ulrich

Actors from the Sopranos eat at Gargiulo’s Restaurant on West 15^th; drunken panhandlers sway on street corners on Neptune Avenue begging; teenage mothers get afternoon snacks at S & W deli; families wait for their laundry at Mr. Wu’s Laundromat; pale European families and hipster Manhattanites speed-walk from the Stillwell Avenue subway stop directly to the boardwalk. Nearly 60,000 people live here, where the income is less than half the national median and over 80 different ethnic groups are represented. This is the Real Coney Island.

“I guess it’s different because more white people live out here now,” said 19-year old Maria Gonzalez as she handed her happy toddler, Leah, a snack pack of Pringles at a corner deli. “But besides that, it’s same old, same old. The cops don’t do anything, you got dealers on the corner, the tourists keep coming to see the beach. It’s just…Coney Island.”

Empty Road

Coney Island is famous for its boardwalk, complete with the popular amusement playground Luna Park and the upcoming Scream Zone, a beautiful beach stretching over two miles, and the oldest continuously operated aquarium in America, New York Aquarium, but the poorer neighborhoods in this southernmost part of Brooklyn are far less cheery. “Closed” signs hang in shuttered windows of delis and 99-cent stores and trash blows down streets like a modern answer to tumbleweeds from the Wild West. Yet reddish-brown apartment buildings tower over these tiny stores, and there are construction sites building more housing in the south. For a small “island”, more and more people are coming out here, both to live and visit.

“People think of The Warriors when they hear Coney Island, but it hasn’t been like that in years,” said Chris Butler, a valet for the upscale restaurant Gargiulo’s. “I think it’s family-friendly. Bloomberg’s renovations are bringing more people out here because it’s a cheap housing alternative, and then tourists are coming because of Luna Park. I think Coney Island is popular again.”

The statistics back him up: there has been a steady increase in population of Coney Island at about 7.3% annually, which is slightly higher than the rest of Brooklyn, according to the 2000 census (the most recent year for data). Additionally, Luna Park brought 14 million visitors to Coney Island last summer, the highest number since 1964. Scream Zone, to be opened next month, is expected to boost tourism to the area as well. For months, construction workers have been erecting rides and setting up the new areas to the boardwalk despite this frigid winter. In the beginning of April the peaks of the Steeplechase Horses Coaster peek out from a blue tarp as workers sit around its base and the 100-foot-tall Zenobio ride goes through test-drive after test-drive with a buckled in green-shirted dummy.

“They keep taunting us! Every time I see the rides going, I think ‘Oh, the park is open!’ and then I see there’s only the one dummy on the ride,” said Chris Mannah, an enthusiastic Coney Island Park maintenance employee. “Polar Bear Club members were out swimming just this morning in their full wetsuits, but all of these visitors are out here just hoping for spring still!”

It is not just the beach with the obese seagulls or the aquarium with Tazo the otter the tourists are coming to see – this past weekend, an event called “Sideshows by the Seashore,” featuring Lil’ Miss Firefly, the “world’s smallest fire eater” and Jennifer Miller, a machete-juggling, bearded performance artist, sold out all shows. This week, there are different burlesque artists, “acrocomedians” (acrobatic comedians), and magician performance events as part of the Congress of Curious Peoples Week. It is events like these that keep Coney Island afloat off-season.

“I haven’t been to any of the shows, but after them people will come and have pizza and they always say they enjoyed them,” said Giovanny, server at Famiglia Pizzeria on the pier. “I’ve worked here for three years, and every day I’ve been busy. But lately tourists keep saying, like, “When can we go on the roller coasters already?”

Mayor Bloomberg facilitated the sale of the six acres used for Luna Park and from privately owned Thor Equities, but he has drawn controversy because nine famous Coney Island attractions, including the infamous Shoot the Freak, were denied new leases with the opening of the new parks. Bloomberg has said his ultimate goal is to make Coney Island a prime vacation destination for year-round.

Many locals think Bloomberg’s goals are too unrealistic. Back at S & W deli, Maria Gonzalez is drinking a peach Snapple. “I just don’t see Coney Island becoming a real vacation spot. I think people get angry and confused with change, so that’s why Bloomberg was getting trouble. But people are not going to just say ‘Oh yeah, I want to go stay in Coney for the boardwalk.’ They don’t want to see this,” she says, gesturing around at the table laden with carved names and the dirty gray-tiled floors. “There’s Disney for that.”

Free Bird

An interesting article

Hey guys, this is a really funny blog post from the NYTimes online about grammatical/spelling errors in print.

 

Art Is What Art Does

By Katharine Ulrich

On the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art spectators are confused. In front of a wall covered in AA Bronson‘s red and green AIDS wallpaper, one gray-haired woman asks another “How is that art?” Probably not the first time that question has been asked in MoMA (remember Marina Abramović‘s performance piece last spring where she just sat and stared?) but in the context of the current contemporary art exhibit, it seems far from far-fetched.

In Contemporary Art from the Collections, the curators rummaged around the vast MoMA storage for post-post modern pieces and organized a cohesive examination of pop culture, from the 60’s on. Surprisingly light on the Warhol but heavy on the heart, “Contemporary Art” focuses on social justice issues such as racial, gender, and class inequality, ultimately showing how even in the assumedly liberal art world, not everyone is equal.

“I was surprised by the exhibit. When I think of art, I think of beauty, not this,” said Astrid Parenty, an NYU sophomore. “In French, there’s a term art engagé, which is art that is provocative and with a cause, and I don’t normally like it. But this exhibit moved me – it changed my view of what art is.”

The exhibit opens on the work of Henrik Olesen, his pieces portraying the confusion that is sexuality, with one particularly powerful piece of a picture of a boy and a typed story about all of the abuse he will suffer in his life due to “wanting to put his body on another boy.” Next is the room with the AIDS wallpaper, which provides an elegantly contrasting backdrop to Robert Mapplethorpe‘s portrait of an Hermes statue.

The last three rooms, however, are harder to describe, and to experience. One visitor described it as an “amalgamation of…disturbance” because the curator utilized the emptiness of the space, the exquisite white walls and shiny wooden floors, to capture the lack of empathy shown toward the subjects – the horror of the easiness of evil. From magazine advertisements from the ’90’s by the Guerrilla Girls illustrating the lack of popular female artists to a devastating collage-style piece by Robert Rauschenberg that utilizes newspaper clippings to tell the story of media as an art form in a sixty-foot screenprint, “Contemporary Art from the Collections” inculcates equality as a hypothetical ideal rather than a modern actuality.

Don’t worry, though, for those looking more for a quick romp in the sheets with Culture rather than the committed marriage that is “Contemporary Art”, look no farther than the third installation of Looking at Music 3.0. Music videos from the 80s and 90s repeatedly play on a big screen in the center of the neon-walled room while interactive kiosks playing different performance pieces are set up along the sides of the room so visitors become literally surrounded by music. It’s like a temple.

“Looking at Music 3.0” is a blast from the past – close your eyes, and you can smell the hairspray and economic tumult of New York in the time when Mayor Ed Koch reigned. Sonic Youth, Le Tigre, Weezer, Run DMC, and Jay-Z, among others, vie for the viewer’s attention. As the big screen blares music videos, the booths against the wall provide bulky headphones for their pieces: a decidedly private or shared public experience, the choice is yours.

“By displaying different forms of music like this, it showed the progression in history of styles,” said Dana Avesar, a visitor. “For example, I liked the video of Grace Jones’ ‘I’m Not Perfect’ because I look at that and you can see Rihanna is influenced by her.”

“Contemporary Art from the Collection” focuses on the results of culture; “Looking at Music 3.0” examines the evolution of counter-culture. Though polar opposite in goals, the two exhibits share the interrelation between culture and art, whether in the context of social injustice or music. They make visitors speculate what art actually is, like any good museum exhibition should.

MoMA is located at 53rd Street between 5th and 6th Ave; “Contemporary Art from the Collection” is on display until May 9, 2011 and “Looking at Music 3.0” is on display until June 6, 2011.

interesting article

Hey guys, I know we all have tons of work, but I just thought this was really a great article. The writer was poking fun at how lame the elite club is.

Dog days are not over

by Katharine Ulrich

She is an old-school glamour queen, posing with the grace and haughtiness one would expect of a veteran pageant winner. Despite her age, Schminky, as her loved ones affectionately know her, is curiously energetic. Her warm brown eyes peer out at me from behind her wispy white bangs as she reclines on the dark leather couch of the Hotel Pennsylvania on a sunny February day. Suddenly, a man with a headset and clipboard shouts out her name, and there’s a dull clack-clack-clack on the beige tile as Champion Los Perritos Covered in Fur prances over to pose for her headshot for the 135^th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

“This is her big opportunity. Schminky hasn’t been in the ring for nine years,” said Kris Glen, her owner. “This will be the first time I’m seeing her show. She’s been neutered, so she can only show in the Veteran’s Sweepstakes, but we know she will win. Just look at her!”

Schminky, a 13-year-old Havanese from the Upper West Side, spent seven hours in the doggy spa and walked on the Jog-a-Dog treadmill, both services provided by the hotel. Most of the pets prep and preen at the Hotel Pennsylvania, located just across the street from Madison Square Garden, in the days prior to the big event. Just ask Jerry Grymek, the man serving as the head of Pooch Relations as “Doggy Concierge.”

“We offer the most services for dogs. Year-round our hotel is pet-friendly, but for the show, we begin prepping months before the competition,” said Grymek. “We have a whole team. These dogs are treated like celebrities, because in reality, they are. They’re the best of their breed.”

These celeb-worthy services, available to anyone staying in the hotel, include a people and pet psychic, treadmills, a Jacuzzi, a full beauty salon, an indoor bathroom area, a masseuse, and numerous vendors for last-minute items, from organic dog food to bedazzled collars.

Come February 14 and 15, 2,500 canines will compete in the show to be aired on USA Network. The gathering and photo shoot on Thursday served as a press event, not that America’s second largest, continuously held sporting event needed it, as evidenced by the numerous observers idling around the lobby.

“I’m just a big dog lover. I’ve only ever seen the show on TV, but this year my boyfriend [got me tickets],” said Erica Rojas, a spectator. “I love talking to different people about the different breeds. These people really love their dogs.”

How do people even become owners of a Westminster dog show contestant? “Sweet story, actually,” says Glen, Schminky’s owner. “I met Schminky through Lynn Miedo, basically the mother of the Havanese breed in America, and she had already had four litters. All of a sudden Lynn wouldn’t give her up – she just loved her too much. But I persisted. For a year we went back and forth, until my granddaughter had her fourth birthday party and she made a huge banner, glitter and everything, that said ‘Schminky belongs in the Big Apple!’ We sent it to Lynn, and a week later, she arrived.” Glen glances down lovingly at Schminky, smugly even, like she shares the dog’s accomplishments. “And now we are here.”